Storms in Encino
by I Am Not Amused
Summary: This is a story about Zelda as much as it is a story about anything else. This is a story about the taste of cherry cheesecake. A snapshot of the Bartowski residence.


This is a story about Zelda as much as it is a story about anything else.

This is a story about Zelda and a storm and how, even though they didn't happen together, they were the same. How they were reactions to and from the same event, even if the storm happened before the event and Zelda happened after.

This is a story about the taste of cherry cheesecake.

See, during a lightning storm, you have to unplug your electronic devices. His dad, he knew that, and he had a lot of electronic devices. Lightning storms didn't happen a lot in Encino, but they did sometimes, and this particular one came quickly. The kid, his name was Charles but everyone called him Chuck, watched his dad run around the house, wildly unplugging everything electronic. From all of his equipment in his room (he'd only been in it once but it was _so cool_ to look at from the occasionally cracked door) to stuff like the toaster and the blender.

This kid, this Chuck, he thought his dad looked pretty funny. He was, like, six or seven at the time.

So there's this kid's dad- the dad's name, it's Stephen- running around with his hair messed up and their mom is out of town and he's pulling everything he can from the walls and he's saying, "It's good, it's good. If we need to run, this will be good practice," and Chuck doesn't know what any of that means, but his Dad looks frazzled and that makes him giggle.

Chuck's sister, her name is Ellie and she had stayed overnight at a friend's house and when she had called, Chuck's dad had said not to come home because lighting searches out conductive materials, like the metal of cars, and that it's too dangerous and that she is to stay right where she is. "Have they unplugged their refrigerator yet?" he asks.

It's all just dark storm clouds on the horizon for a few hours, and when it comes it's not just rain, but hail and debris being scattered by the wind. Chuck, this little six-year-old kid, he presses his face up to the glass of the living room window, watching everything because even though he doesn't yet have the words to describe what he's seeing, he thinks it's kind of beautiful.

His Dad, Stephen, he watches over Chuck's shoulder. In the few patches of grass that dot their neighborhood, they both watch the hail hit the emerald green carpet and then- _ooh_- bounce for a moment, like you imagine Mexican Jumping Beans do when you're little and don't know better. The water, it comes down at these violent angles over the awning and gutters of their house, and you can see traveling pockets of it over the streets in sheet metal patterns, twisting and swerving across the landscape. The lighting booms scare this kid, but he doesn't want anyone to know that so he forces himself not to flinch beyond the natural reaction of something so incredibly loud hitting his ear drums.

This little brown-haired kid, he watches the storm rage around outside and thinks about the four walls of his house keeping the bad things away, and how those four walls will always protect him, always be his home.

Then his mom leaves and this kid, he thinks that she took at least one of those walls with her forever.

So, during a lightning storm, you have to unplug all of your electrical devices, even your Nintendo. But when the storm is over and your mom's necklace is broken and all of her stuff is gone, then you can plug it back in and pretend, with your best friend, that you're Link for a little while.

Hyrule doesn't have storms, see, so this kid- he's ten now and so is his best friend Morgan- he doesn't see the connection right away. How lightning storms and cherry cheesecake and _Legend of Zelda_ and absentee mothers all belong to, all deserve each other.

Hyrule has monsters instead. They pop up out of the ground, out of the water. They jump at you from impossible angles, and all you have is a sword you can swipe in front of you or a shield you can put the same way. So when you're hit because you can only protect your heart in that one direction, your heart then breaks into two pieces and one is gone forever.

He likes Hyrule because you can collect those pieces again and then everything is okay, but there's a piece of his that still is out in that storm somewhere and you need more than a mono-directional sword and shield to find that.

His friend, this Morgan kid, alternates between staying deathly silent for about ten minutes at a time, and exploding with energy, "Dude! Watch out! Arrow, arrow! Oh, man, watch out behind you!"

The cheesecake, it's sitting between them on Chuck's bed and it's not cut into pieces so much as tunneled into by forks, its surface all very _Close Encounters of the Third Kind_, and when either one of them is playing, their forks stay in their mouths, pushed to one side or the other depending on their level of concentration, and the one who isn't playing digs some more tunnels, trying to find the actual cherries within the cheesecake, and not just the flavored swirl that ran throughout.

For whatever reason, not many cherries are present. And their absence is noticeable.

Chuck, he watches these monsters jumping out at him and they look like the hail that bounced like Mexican Jumping Beans all those years ago and the cherries are absent like one wall of his home. He's watching this little guy in green clothes and he's trying to protect himself when all he's got is the one little shield and one little sword and how are you supposed to be protected when the storm can come in through the missing wall?

He doesn't have the answer to that question. He's just ten.

Ellie, she's older than him and she's already frantic about checkbooks and mortgage payments and credit cards. She disappears in the enormity of it all, while he gets stuck in this minutiae- not that he knows what that word means- of the details, like the way her hands would graze his skin and it felt like rain water and there used to be lightning storms of static electricity that would pass between them when she would tuck him in. This Chuck kid's mom, whose name is Mary, she put on this lip gloss at night to keep her lips moist overnight, and it was cheery cheesecake flavored. He's a boy, and he's eight-years old, _thank you very much_, and he pretends not to like it when his mom tucks him in at night, pretends to not like it when she gives him a reassuring kiss on her cheek. He says, "Yuck," and wipes it off but notices it tastes like cherry cheesecake.

The day her necklace gets broken she cries and she's dressed in green like Link and her tears come down in these delicate droplets over the awning of her cheeks and she's wearing her lip gloss when she reassures him it's okay.

He doesn't put it all together, but these things, his mom and cherry cheesecake and Zelda and that storm, they're all really part of the same thing.


End file.
